The Archivist at Pennsylvania's Bethany Children's home,
which was established in 1867 and remains in operation today,
emailed to let me know that MOcavo has digitized and indexed the
home's early records. They're in three collections called
Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, Bethany Children's Home Book of Children
One Index, Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, Bethany Children's Home Book of
Children Two Index, and Bethany Children's Home Book of Life Index.
On Mocavo, you can search and view records in one collection at a
time for free. With a subscription, you can search and view
records from multiple collections simultaneously. Learn
more about the Bethany Children's Home records on Mocavo's blog.

The Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is launching a portal to give
you access to photos
from residential schools dating from 1885 to 1996. The LAC
notes that 150,000 Aboriginal children attended more than 130
residential schools around the country. You already can see
65 photos from schools in Alberta, and you'll be able to find
more photos by province or territory as they become available.
Descriptions are included with dates, school names and locations
when available (so far I haven't found any names of students shown
in photos).

The British government created the register to record information
about citizens as of Sept. 29, 1939, as WWII broke out in Europe. It
was used to issue identity cards and ration books, and later formed
the basis of National Health Service records.

The register contains an individuals' full name, addresses, date of
birth, sex, marital status and occupation, and also notes changes of
name.

The 1.2 million digital images in the 1939 Register collection will
become searchable on findmypast.co.uk within the next two years.
Information about living individuals, however, will be kept closed
for 100 years from their year of birth, or until proof of death has
been authenticated.

Our Unpuzzling
Ancestral Names Value Pack made me curious about my family
surnames and whether things I heard growing up about
where a name is from or what it means are true. Here's how I checked
out a few of the names I'm researching:

Haddad: My maiden name, inherited from my
great-grandparents who immigrated in 1900, is the Lebanese
equivalent to Smith. I Googled surname Haddad and one of
the results was this
Wikipedia page.

Seeger: I looked up this name, which comes from my
German ancestor H.A. Seeger, in the last name search on
Ancestry.com, which uses surname meanings and origins from
the Oxford Dictionary of American Family Names (a
reference you also might be able to find in a library). It also
maps where in the United States most people with that name
lived. The name is German and Dutch, "from the Germanic personal
name Sigiheri."

Norris:
This name, which belonged to my Irish third-great-grandfather
Edward Norris, is a place-based name for someone from the North
or who lived on the north side of a settlement. It also could be
a French occupational name for a nurse. According to the Irish
Times' mid-1800s surname distribution search, most
Norrises lived in County Waterford, with next-door Tipperary and
Kilkenny as runners-up. Family lore says Edward came from County
Cork, which also is on the list and borders Waterford.

Frost: This surname, from my English
third-great-grandfather, gives me fits in online searches.
Besides all the weather reports, it's a pretty common name. It
helps to add place names, genealogy and -weather
or -winter to my searches. The name could be English,
German, Danish or Swedish, and it's based on a nickname for
someone "of an icy and unbending disposition or who had white
hair."

Reuter: Google wants to show me Reuters news reports
if I forget quotation marks (as in "Reuter") when searching for
this name online. It's a German name, possibly for "someone who
lived in a clearing or an occupational name for a clearer of
woodland."

Ladenkotter/Ladenkoetter: Does anyone have ideas about
this German name? It's not in
the Oxford Dictionary of American Family Names or on
surname sites, and web searches turn up mostly my own posts. I
even tried typing the name into Google translate to
see if it means anything in German (it doesn't). On the plus
side, it's unusual, and just about any Ladenkoetter records
I find are for a relative. Update: If you have German roots, the comments about this name's origins (including one from A Genealogist's Guide to Discovering Your Germanic Ancestors coauthor Ernest Thode) are insightful. Thank you to Mr. Thode, K. Hewett and Fawn!

The Unpuzzling
Ancestral Names Value Pack has resources for searching names,
understanding naming patterns, figuring out how surnames changed
over time, and discovering surname origins and meanings. Learn more
about it in ShopFamilyTree.com.

March is Women's History
Month, so it seems a good time to share tips and facts from Legal Genealogist Judy
G. Russell's "Female Ancestors and the Law" chat for our
Family Tree University Virtual Genealogy Conference last month.

Judy opened the chat with this interesting tidbit: Under common law, a girl could be betrothed
at age 7. She was entitled to dower at age 9. She couldn’t
choose a guardian until she was 14 or serve as executrix until
17, and wasn’t of full age until 21. But she could be married
off at age 12.

A married woman was called a feme
covert, which literally means a woman hidden behind the
identity of her husband.

A widowed woman would have to be named guardian of her own
children in a probate court, or the court might name a male
relative to look after the children's inherited property (even
if they still lived with their mother).

An underage woman usually had to have a male guardian's
permission to marry. Look for a record with the couple's
marriage record.

Early divorces often had to be approved by state legislatures;
look for these records in legislative records (usually at a
state archive).

Prenuptial agreements, often found with deeds or court
records, weren't uncommon, even early on.

Land records are excellent for researching
women. A husband had to sell land, even if the wife had
inherited it from her father, but the wife had to sign off on
it. That's called her "dower" right (not to be confused with a
dowry), and it was intended to provide some means of support
for a woman whose husband had died.

"Property" transfers of slaves,
usually in chancery or equity courts, also can be a source of
information on female heirs.

Chat participants have had luck finding maiden names in
children's birth, marriage and death records; and in male
ancestors' wills. Several said that
sons in their families received the mother's maiden name as a
middle name.

One chatter reminded us not to assume that someone listed by
initials in a record (such as M.A. Smith) is male.

figure out
which test to take to solve which types of research problems

how to interpret your test results

Blaine has written on genetic genealogy for Family
Tree Magazine, and I have to say he's a very good explainer
of things—great at turning complicated genetic genealogy
information into concepts my brain can wrap itself around.

Podcast listeners also can tour of the Digital
Public Library of America (DPLA) website with DPLA executive
director Dan Cohen, and get tips on unpuzzling US county boundary
changes with Family Tree Magazine contributing editor David
A. Fryxell.

Lisa also chats with Family Tree Magazine publisher Allison
Dolan and myself about solving genealogy research problems.

Orders for FamilySearch microfilm and microfiche numbered above
1,881,705 will be restricted for a two-week period in early April.
Half a million rolls of film plus numerous microfiche cabinets at
the Granite Mountain vault will be relocated into newly renovated
space. As a result, the Family History Library won't be able to
order the affected film and fiche. Film and fiche numbered below
1,881,705 can be ordered as usual. Read
the notice on the FamilySearch blog.

Planning research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, or
College Park, Md., in April? You might be able to plan your itinerary around
one of the archives' free genealogy programs, such as an
introduction to research in the archives' records (April 2),
nonpopulation censuses (April 16), tracing immigrants from the
West Indies (April 17), or a "Help! I'm Stuck" consultation (April
26). Find
times and locations on the National Archives' website.

Genealogy website Mocavo is letting free Basic members try all the Mocavo Gold features for
free this weekend.

Gold-level benefits include searching across all Mocavo databases at
once (with the free Basic account, you can search one database at a time),
receiving "discovery alerts" when records match your uploaded tree,
downloading and printing documents, and more.

The index contains more than 102,000 names from records (original
documents, copies, transcripts, abstracts or extracts) at the
National Archives of Ireland.

Each index entry contains the name of the person leaving a will, or
being covered by a grant of probate or administration. It also
contains the person's address, sometimes an occupation, and the
place where the document was proved (i.e. a diocesan or the
Prerogative court). Almost half of the index entries name an
executor and that person's address.

The free period runs from March 17 at 12:01 a.m. to March 18 at 8
a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

I used this Time
Zone Converter to figure out that in my local East Coast Time,
that's March 16 at 8:01 p.m. through March 18 at 4 a.m.

church and civil indexes to Irish births and baptisms,
marriages, and deaths (these are from FamilySearch)

the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses

Catholic sacramental registers

Quebec vital and church records from the Drouin collection

Griffith's Valuation

New York Emigrant Savings Bank records

Irish Canadian emigration records

Search the
Irish record collections here. You'll need to register for a
free Ancestry.com account (or log into your free account) to take
advantage of this offer. The free period ends Monday, March 17 at
11:59 p.m. ET.

Ancestry.com also is offering its
AncestryDNA test, which can break out your Irish ancestry from
the rest of the UK to show you where your roots might lie, for $89 (10 percent off).